I have a wide range of interests. When I am not growing tomatoes, loving animals and making projects out of paper mache, I enjoy pondering the world around me. Thus, when I noticed a flier for a lecture by a prominent philosophy professor from the University of California at San Diego, I jumped at the opportunity. After getting the time and date wrong I, in my zeal for philosophy conversation, finally made it to the lecture hall.
He started out by retelling the conversation he had had a few weeks prior over lunch with two professors of biology at the University. They had insisted that scientifically it was impossible for life to exist after death, while he maintained that because we have the linguistic terms for self, then it must exist. That was what he presented to us tonight. His thesis on the afterlife was derived from a lunch conversation.
To be a little more precise, he stated that because we have differing terms of self, such as my and I, therefore we have already in our vocabulary the words for something besides a strictly physical existence. He asked us to consider how we would say the phrase "my leg hurts," but in essence we are more than just a leg, the leg belongs to "us" and that s what was significant. He then asked us to look up the definition of any animal in a "good" dictionary and we would find a picture of that animal, what foods it eats, where it lives, etc. But if we were to look up the definition of "person" we would find no such descriptors, but instead a series of words describing the faculties of logic and reason. Because of the way we define ourselves, we are already assuming that we are more than just physical creatures but logical creatures and therefore possibly eternal creatures.
I personally found this "logic" (as he referred to it a multitude of times) faulty. We ourselves shape our language. Does this mean that we also shape our destinies, our afterlives? He also kept referring to the equation a+a=a, and saying that concrete logic, such as this equation, was what brought him to his thesis. But, logically, a+a does not equal "a" but "2a." The logic from which our certain afterlife was derived was crumbling beneath him.
After the fifteen minute lecture (1/4th of the allotted time) he opened the floor up for questions. But, unfortunately, the questions the philosophical community at Luther conjured up were "too complex to be answered at this time" or needed to be understood "within the context of my book." The most insulting, however, was the "you need to take a philosophy course to understand" response given to one of our esteemed professors of philosophy.
What I left the lecture with (besides a feeling of relief that I did not attend the University of California at San Diego) was a flaming indigence at the ignorance this professor assumed we lived in, and no clear philosophical argument for life after death.
He started out by retelling the conversation he had had a few weeks prior over lunch with two professors of biology at the University. They had insisted that scientifically it was impossible for life to exist after death, while he maintained that because we have the linguistic terms for self, then it must exist. That was what he presented to us tonight. His thesis on the afterlife was derived from a lunch conversation.
To be a little more precise, he stated that because we have differing terms of self, such as my and I, therefore we have already in our vocabulary the words for something besides a strictly physical existence. He asked us to consider how we would say the phrase "my leg hurts," but in essence we are more than just a leg, the leg belongs to "us" and that s what was significant. He then asked us to look up the definition of any animal in a "good" dictionary and we would find a picture of that animal, what foods it eats, where it lives, etc. But if we were to look up the definition of "person" we would find no such descriptors, but instead a series of words describing the faculties of logic and reason. Because of the way we define ourselves, we are already assuming that we are more than just physical creatures but logical creatures and therefore possibly eternal creatures.
I personally found this "logic" (as he referred to it a multitude of times) faulty. We ourselves shape our language. Does this mean that we also shape our destinies, our afterlives? He also kept referring to the equation a+a=a, and saying that concrete logic, such as this equation, was what brought him to his thesis. But, logically, a+a does not equal "a" but "2a." The logic from which our certain afterlife was derived was crumbling beneath him.
After the fifteen minute lecture (1/4th of the allotted time) he opened the floor up for questions. But, unfortunately, the questions the philosophical community at Luther conjured up were "too complex to be answered at this time" or needed to be understood "within the context of my book." The most insulting, however, was the "you need to take a philosophy course to understand" response given to one of our esteemed professors of philosophy.
What I left the lecture with (besides a feeling of relief that I did not attend the University of California at San Diego) was a flaming indigence at the ignorance this professor assumed we lived in, and no clear philosophical argument for life after death.
1 comment:
Rachel-
This was a very interesting read. I can see how his biases lead him to his version of knowledge and reality which he tried to impose upon others. It is a good reminder that we as teachers must always be careful about how we present our information and the feedback we give our students - in his case audience.
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